Sarah Aulie was a 24-year-old who had no idea what to do with her life. Since graduating college, she had worked as a wedding photographer, traveled and spent some time working with refugee programs in the city of Chicago. She never dreamed that God would call her to ministry for women trapped in Calcutta’s Red Light District … but that’s exactly what He was about to do.

“All of these interesting things were happening in my life,” Aulie explains as a quiet smile spreads across her face. She had broken up with her boyfriend, was thinking of leaving her job and had just moved back in with her family.

But in the middle of the chaos, Aulie did know one thing. She knew that for some unexplainable reason God was calling her to go to Calcutta. “For me to know anything decidedly is insane … but I just knew I was supposed to go to Calcutta.” In November 2006, she boarded a plane for India with no idea what was waiting for her.

“I arrived in Calcutta and really didn’t know what I was going to do,” she says. “I remember walking into the guest lodge down the street from Mother Teresa’s convent. It was this small room with a tiny little cot. I lay down on the cot with this gnarled mosquito net all around me and asked myself, What am I doing here?” Unfortunately, there wasn’t any burning bush or divine light at the moment, only the overwhelming sense of being far from home in a strange land.

“There was this feeling of things pressing in all around me—the people, the smell, the noise, the heat,” she explains. “I thought to myself, I’ve spent my life savings on coming here … now what?” In her heart, Aulie was hoping the trip would lead to some clear direction for her life. She was hungry to hear God’s voice, but it seemed like God wasn’t saying much.

Aulie spent her first couple days in the city and in the slums of Calcutta. On more than one occasion she noticed that women were reusing discarded saris to make quilted blankets. The garments were hand-stitched together, back to back, creating a blanket. Curious, Aulie asked about them and discovered that these women used a kantha stitch, a traditional stitch handed down from generation to generation. The beauty of this craft struck Aulie—even in the slums women were creating blankets to keep their children warm at night, so that “out of this survival instinct they made something old into
something beautiful.”

Aulie found herself drawn to the beauty of the handmade blankets. Through a ministry called the Swadhar Project, a home for women who have retired from prostitution, Aulie befriended several women who agreed to teach her the craft. She began in the local market searching out secondhand saris. To say that she was out of place would be an understatement: a young American woman shopping in an Indian street market for secondhand saris with no knowledge of the Hindi language. Strange, but it seemed right. That feeling would be confirmed that day by a woman named Protiva.

Protiva, a local Christian woman, had been fasting and praying in anticipation of a divine appointment that day. Sure enough, she was the one Aulie stopped to ask for help in the market. Aulie soon found out that Protiva shared her tender heart for the oppressed women of India, and the two became instant partners in the sari hunt. Protiva led Aulie to the fabric, Aulie picked out the prints and Protiva negotiated the price. Looking back, Aulie explains that the adventure reached way beyond her and Protiva. “Everything just started happening! I realized that Jesus had an energy for this project and I was just trying to keep up with what He was already doing there!”

The women of the Swadhar Project were thrilled by Aulie’s finds and her peculiar interest in their blanket-making skill. “This mentality we have as American Christians is that we have something for someone else, but the reality is that I didn’t have anything to teach these girls, but they had something to teach me.” Aulie soaked it all in—the laughs, the stitches, the stories. Laughter and smiles dominated the vocabulary of these sewing afternoons. “You don’t have to speak the same language to see the beauty in someone,” Aulie says.

At the end of her time, Aulie purchased the blankets from the Swadhar Project women in order to take them back to the United States to sell. She explained to them that their blankets would be sold in America for a good price because they were so beautiful. “I loved seeing their surprise when what I said was translated,” she says. These women, trained by a culture of sexism and prostitution, were astounded and delighted by the value Aulie saw in them and in their work. “I see the power now of a creative enterprise for women and the importance for them to understand that what they offer is valuable.” These were women who were being empowered by the knowledge that they have something to offer other than their bodies.

Immediately Aulie began thinking of all the women who have not heard that message of dignity, value and opportunity. “I realized that the Swadhar Project girls were going to be OK—they have housing and income—but there are other girls who need to hear this message,” she says. With just a few days left in Calcutta, Aulie visited the Red Light District with Protiva as her guide and translator, to offer a new job to anyone who wanted an alternative to their lifestyle of prostitution. Several women responded. Aulie left them in the care of Protiva with enough material to get started.

As the blankets are completed, Protiva pays the women for their work and ships the blankets to Aulie to sell. The goal, ultimately, is to earn enough money through the sales of these blankets to build a home for these women to move completely out of the Red Light District. Aulie learned that for now, they are receiving wages for each blanket they create—wages significantly more than what they earned on the streets. “Once their need for employment is met, they can be more free to hear about God’s love.”

God’s reasons for Aulie’s Calcutta journey are clear now. Her simple steps of responding to God’s unexplained call have yielded a miraculous ministry of redemption in an area of overwhelming need. Aulie’s favorite part of this surprising ministry God invited her into? “[Seeing] the beautiful creativity of the women that is woven into each stitch.” It’s the realization from which Aulie created the name for this new ministry, hatha ka bana, which means “handmade” in Hindi. Her eyes shine as she shares the tag line that sums up the new ministry: “Blankets handmade by women. Women handmade by God.”

Photos by Sarah Aulie